


Let's Not Do This Again

by birlcholtz (justwhatialwayswanted)



Category: Sharp Zero (Webcomic)
Genre: (by which i mean alex is very attractive and they're stuck in a confined space together0, Gen, and trying not to reveal secret identities or superpowers, breaking out of a building, some vague ace being ace at the beginning but other than that no romance, that's it that's the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 02:48:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15209183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justwhatialwayswanted/pseuds/birlcholtz
Summary: There are two problems for Alex right now.The first one is that he's tied up in an office building that he knows for a fact is patrolled by armed security guards 24/7.The second one is that he's tied up with a civilian, so he can't even use his powers to get out.





	Let's Not Do This Again

**Author's Note:**

> Lightning Heterodyne sent me a prompt that kinda turned into this. I'm taking the opportunity (since it turned out pretty long) to increase the number of fics in the Sharp Zero tag.

“Hey,” the other guy says. “Wanna get out of here?”

“You say that like we have a choice in the matter.”

“I mean, we could probably figure something out. It’s not like they’ve come in here to check on us.”

And that’s true, but the only ‘figure something out’ Alex has come up with involves blatantly and obviously using his powers, and given that as far as the other guy knows, Redshift is nowhere nearby, that’s not going to work.

Still, if the other guy has an idea, it wouldn’t hurt to hear it.

“What did you have in mind?”

The guy nods at the vent. “If I can get the grate off of there, we can cut through the zip ties, as long as you’ve gotten your tetanus shots. Looks like there’s some rust.”

The vent is a good eight feet in the air. “How are you going to get up there?”

“Are those muscles for show or not?”

“They’re not.”

“Good. So you’ll lift me.”

“How are you going to get the grate off?”

“Willpower? Nah, I’m just going to pull it off. Like I said, it looks rusty as hell. Then maybe I can splinter it, make some non-designer lockpicks. Can you pick locks?”

“Why would your mind jump to making lockpicks if you can’t pick locks?”

“I can, but it’s a useful skill. As long as we’re together, I might as well give you a quick master class.”

“No need. I can pick locks.”

“Wow. Muscles  _ and _ hidden skills. That’s good, anyway. We can keep up with each other.” He winks.

Alex doesn’t respond to that. “We’re both tall enough that it should work pretty easily. Can you fit on one of my shoulders?”

“Probably, you’re a Dorito.”

“Let’s try it.” He squats just enough that it won’t be completely impossible to stand back up and Other Guy perches on his shoulder, tucking his feet around Alex’s side to keep from falling off and gripping the side of Alex’s neck, which isn’t that comfortable but given the whole wrists-tied-together situation, Alex is willing to work with it. He puts his hands on Other Guy’s knees to steady him. “Comfortable?”

“Very. Let’s break that grate.”

Alex stands slowly and walks as well as he can given the zip ties to the wall, where Other Guy starts fiddling with the grate. There’s enough rust that it shouldn’t be that hard to get out, but Other Guy is wearing fingerless gloves, which won’t help at all with the whole tetanus thing. 

As Other Guy messes with something on the corner, his elbow hits another section, which comes loose.

“Hey, dude. Bottom right. You can break that off.”

“So I can. Want me to untie your hands?”

“If you do that, I can get started on untying your feet while you break off another piece of the grate.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Other Guy takes one glove off and wraps it around his fingers so he can remove the piece without getting cut by any of the edges, then says, “But if you untie my feet now then both your hands will be doing that and I’ll be paranoid about falling. Let me untie your hands first.”

“Okay.”

He holds up his hands and Other Guy starts carefully sawing through the zip tie. He doesn’t cut Alex’s hands, but it’s close enough that some of the rust rubs off. Alex tries to avoid breathing too hard, since if Other Guy loses his balance and falls, he’s holding a very sharp and dangerous piece of metal.

“It’s pretty close,” Other Guy finally says. “Can you just break it?”

Alex studies the zip tie. There’s a fragment of plastic left on the section Other Guy has been sawing at. “Yes, but hold on to something.”

“Your hair is very soft.”

“Thanks.” Alex snaps the zip tie. “Okay, give me the grate piece. And if you keep putting your feet behind me I can’t reach them, so stop that.”

Other Guy hands it over, untucks his feet from behind Alex’s ribcage, and goes back to loosening the part of the grate that’s still left in the wall, but Alex doesn’t watch. He focuses on getting through the zip tie currently binding Other Guy’s ankles together. And if he uses a bit of his speed to do it, that’s fine— Other Guy is concentrating on the grate and the sooner they get out of here, the better.

He only looks up when there’s a bright green spark that falls past him. “What are you doing?”

“Having regrets,” Other Guy says. His other glove is back on his other hand, and he’s loosening the sides of the grate with his fingertips.

Alex is not envious. He goes back to sawing away at the zip tie, and alerts Other Guy when he’s done.

“Awesome, that was fast. Can you do my hands?”

“I don’t know, I can’t really see what I’m doing since you’re up there.”

“I can move my hands lower?”

“That works. Okay, don’t fall.”

This time it takes longer, partially because the angle is a little more awkward and partially because Alex can’t guarantee that Other Guy isn’t watching him, so he can’t use his speed. The pace is excruciatingly slow, enough that he says, “Just let me know when you think you can break it and I’ll stop.”

“Okay.”

He keeps going in silence for a little while, but then Other Guy says, “Okay, I can break it” at least a couple minutes before Alex expects him to.

“Okay.”

Other Guy yanks his wrists apart, and the zip tie does break, but with less of a ‘pop’ than when Alex did it, and more of a slow pulling apart. He immediately tosses it backwards, over Alex’s shoulder.

“So now we’ve untied everything except your ankles, but then we still need those lockpicks.”

“Yeah, and then we still need a plan to get out of here. I’ve been here before to scout. There are a lot of guards. Pretty much the only way to get out is by blasting your way through the side of the building and hoping you land outside the perimeter.”

“Hm. Do you know if any of our walls lead to the outside?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, no harm in trying, I guess. I can blast us through the side of the building, but only if you don’t look, because my equipment has blinded people before.”

“Equipment?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve got hidden pockets everywhere.”

“How much time do you need to get ready to blow up some walls?”

“A minute or two.”

“Okay, then I need to untie my ankles first.”

“Let me down, and then you can do whatever you want as far as I’m concerned.”

“I can get us outside the perimeter.”

“I knew I liked you for some reason. How are you going to do that?”

“Part remembering the pattern from last time I was here, part punching people in the face.”

“Great. I can help with the second part.”

“I can do it faster by myself.”

“But I’ll trust that you’re not going to get us captured again if I come with you.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

“No, you can’t. If we’re going to make a guess about which wall will take us outside, then it’s probably the one opposite the door, because we’re in the middle of a hallway, so my guess is that the walls on either side will just take us into more rooms.”

“Okay.” Alex grabs Other Guy by the waist and sets him down on the ground. “Let me just untie my feet and then we can go.”

“What do we do if that wall doesn’t lead outside?”

“We keep blowing up walls until we find one that does. I’ll cover your back.”

Other Guy grins. “Sounds like my kind of chaos.”

Alex makes a perfunctory effort at sawing through the zip tie before checking to make sure Other Guy isn’t watching and just yanking his feet apart so it breaks. 

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Other Guy messes with something in his jacket, says “Close your eyes,” and he must blow up the wall, because Alex can detect the brightness and the rush of air through his closed eyelids, but it’s impressively quiet for an explosion.

There’s silence for a moment, and then Other Guy says, “We got lucky, it leads outside. How comfortable are you with running across rooftops?”

Alex opens his eyes. Almost all of that wall is gone, and the edges have been blackened by the explosion. “More than I should be.”

Other Guy is looking outside. “Me too. There’s a rooftop with, like, a seven, eight-foot gap. It’s a story down, too, so we are  _ really _ lucky. Can you make that jump or should I go first?”

“I can make the jump.” 

“Great. Let’s move.”

They both back up to the other side of the room, then take a running leap and hit the other rooftop rolling to avoid breaking anything.

“How are you so good at this?” Alex asks.

“How are  _ you _ so good at this?”

“Fair enough. I’m thinking we find a low enough rooftop that we can climb down into an alley or something. As long as it opens out onto a street we’ll be fine.”

“Works for me.”

They start running.

It takes a long time for them to find a low rooftop. Mostly because it turns out they’re eight stories up, and Alex wants to find one that’s two stories or less, because he doesn’t have the vast majority of his stuff (and he can’t shift), and Other Guy is almost definitely not equipped for a jump higher than that (even if he has been somewhat surprising already). The majority of buildings are either way too high or way too low, so they manage a couple of blocks, but by that point Other Guy is panting a little, so they stop.

“How... are you so fit...” Other Guy says.

Alex doesn’t answer that. “There’s a six-story building kitty-corner to this one. Can you make it?”

It also happens to have a door that he’s willing to bet leads to a stairwell, so they can stop running across the top of buildings and run down some stairs instead.

“Yes,” Other Guy says after he’s caught his breath. “Let’s go.”

They run, and jump, and roll, and then Alex tries the door. It’s unlocked, which is what he expected— it’s clearly a maintenance door of some sort for what looks like an apartment building, and whoever was up here last has made the mistake of assuming that the only people who could get up here came up through the apartment building itself.

“We can get down to street level this way.”

“Awesome.”

They don’t talk as they go down flight of stairs after flight of stairs. Other Guy needs his breath, and Alex is busy trying to figure out exactly where they are. He wasn’t really keeping track of what streets they were by as they jumped from building to building.

Finally,  _ finally, _ they reach the ground floor, but Other Guy holds an arm out before they walk out.

“We look like we just broke out of an office building,” he says. 

And that’s a good point. So they spend a couple of minutes brushing off dust and straightening clothes and hair before Alex pushes open the door and they step out into an empty lobby.

“We are so lucky,” he breathes.

“It’s my superpower,” Other Guy says.

“What? Really?”

“Nah, just kidding. I don’t have powers.”

They cross the lobby to the front doors as casually as possible, and go out the glass door to the sidewalk.

“I’m going this way,” Other Guy says, pointing left.

“Oh, I’m going the other way,” Alex says. He still doesn’t know where they are, but he can just get a block or two away and call Mission Control, so it doesn’t matter that much, and he wants to get out of here before Other Guy has any more chances to wonder why he’s not tired at all.

“Shame. What’s your name?”

“Alex.”

“I’m Ace. Nice to meet you.”

“You too. Let’s not do this again.”

“Let’s not. See you around.” And with that, Ace walks away.

It’s a big city, but the amount of certainty with which Ace said ‘see you around’ makes Alex think that maybe they will.

He just hopes it will be under very different circumstances.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! <3  
> -birl


End file.
